


better hang your dead palace, than have a living home to lose

by blurhawaii



Category: Hell or High Water (2016)
Genre: Animal Death, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Sibling Incest, Underage Drinking, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 14:27:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8894197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blurhawaii/pseuds/blurhawaii
Summary: As slow as the weeks passed, an almost hopeful kind of green began to sweep across his boy’s land. It was a shade Toby was hard pressed to recall.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [th_esaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/gifts).



> Merry Christmas, th_esaurus, I hope this pile of pretentious drivel somehow brightens your day.

He didn’t have a real answer for Debbie when she caught him digging a row of holes along the edge of their property several days before the oil company was due to arrive. He thought the peach saplings still wrapped up in tarpaulin on the bed of his truck said it all.

She didn’t push it, not when she took in the manic way Toby was driving the shovel into the dirt again and again. _You never were much of a farmer_ , she said, _don’t see why you’d start now._ But she left him to it, in the midday heat, and came back an hour later to the see the finished product with a beer sweating in her hand.

 _Hope you’re not thinking ‘bout putting up a plaque or anything like that_ , she said as she handed over the drink, _that man has no place in our home, not anymore. You’d do well to remember it’s mine and the boys now._

 _No, Ma'am_ , Toby said, his voice cracking dry like the ground under his feet. He touched the beer to his hot forehead saying, _nothing like that, just thought I’d get the place looking nice, is all, before they come tear it all up._

That is, before the landscape Toby grew up admiring the way most folks would admire a bushfire, untethered in its destruction, was finally peeled free from his hands and cracked open right down the middle.

He would grow to admire the newly planted trees in front of him in very much the same way. A handful of saplings listing in the sun, like little tin cans on a fence, they were almost daring someone to come and take a shot. Baiting, is what it was.

In the years to follow, Toby could imagine their roots taking hold of the chassis buried underneath, winding through the bullet holes and the webbed windows to starve themselves on sheet metal and rubber tires. He grew up here too, sprouted up fast like a weed between one day and the next, he knew what it was like to take a dirt caked hand to the face and come up kicking. He knew there was very little nutrition to be found here at all but a future in exchange for some big sacrifice.

While the sacrifice wasn’t his to make in the end, he still knew the struggle of standing upright in hundred degree weather and remaining there for the rest of his days.

That was their lot now. Him and the trees.

Waiting for a shot that would never come.

-  
-

“You talk like we ain’t gonna get away with this,” Toby had said, hunched over the tabletop, and he looked up only long after the bitter edge in his voice had been left to fester.

Tanner had already been watching him then, drinking him down in a manner that had Toby rubbing his sweaty hands clean over his thighs.

“I ain’t never met nobody who got away with anything,” he’d said. “Have you?”

But this was a lie.

Tanner had followed their father into the barn that April way back with every intention to shoot him.

Aimed at the gut and not the head and took impassive steps back when his daddy clawed at his feet and spat blood so dark it was black at his ankles.

Stepped back as far as the barn door where his daddy didn’t have the strength to reach and sat with his knees drawn up, the rifle laid flat across them. And waited.

He got away this.

And so much more.

-  
-

As slow as the weeks passed, an almost hopeful kind of green began to sweep across his boy’s land. It was a shade Toby was hard pressed to recall. And with each pocket of oil they bled dry, the skin and bones cattle grazing there began to grow into a shape more recognisable for the buyer a town over. The man made the trek to their ranch handily now, when he wouldn’t before, took one look at the pump jacks and whistled high and sharp.

He went on to spin Toby a tale of how all the devilry in this place must have came in the form of a black river running under their feet. Toby nodded and grunted in all the right places, saying nothing of his father or his mother who both died here, but he found himself biting his tongue when the man skirted Tanner’s name altogether, the blackest of black marks, and didn’t attempt to move from his place leaning on their makeshift corral when it came time to help him and his ranch hands load up the animals.

The sun beat down unrelenting on the nape of his neck, heavy like a thumb and finger that was there to keep his head bowed and, by the time the last of the herd had been urged up the ramp to the man’s hitched trailer, he had bent to its will completely, resting his chin on his folded arms with his hat pulled low to shade his eyes.

The man wandered over after a time, steady as he pleased. Clapped the dust from his hands, scuffed his boots, spat into the dirt. Did all the things a man did in the country when there was a moment of silence. An expectation of money owed. Everything but pack up his shit and get ready to move on.

“Sure is a sight you got here,” he said at last, although it was clear he wasn’t really sure what he was looking at. The man still reared heifers with nothing but his bare hands that the future must have looked odd dotted across his boy’s land like it was. He went on, hands on his portly hips, to say, “Easiest money you’ll ever make, I’d reckon. Bet you’ll wonder how you ever lived ’fore all this fell in your lap.”

On the other side of the ranch the row of peach saplings had found their feet and were thriving. How easy it was for them to adapt to a cleansed landscape and feed. It gave Toby hope, hope that they’d actually done something right despite how, siphoned into every inch of him, every pore and every molecule, the black tar in Toby’s stomach rolled over like it was an ocean.

“We done here?”

The man looked over quick at the sharpness of Toby’s tone and nodded when all he got in return was the hard line of Toby’s profile.

His boys didn’t need the money but Toby accepted the man’s hundred dollars for what it was, an apology, and tucked it into his shirt pocket. _What the hell were we going to do with a field full of half dead cows anyway_ , Debbie said later when Toby handed over the money. He didn't point out the hypocrisy on her tucking the hundred away into the swell of her bra. His youngest was in the room with them.

As it was, the boy had taken a shine to the pumps. Easily charmed by the cheerful yellow of their paintjob, appearing like sunspots across the horizon. Toby often caught him pressing his face up against the windows to watch them in motion, the wireframe of his glasses chinking against the glass.

He knew very little of what his father and his uncle had done to get them here; when Debbie said Tanner wasn’t welcome here no more, she had meant it. Toby had never told her outright either, but she had a tendency to assume the worst about Tanner and sacrificing himself for family was maybe the worst thing he could possibly have done.

Toby stroked a careful hand over his son’s head, not wanting to pull him away from the window, but the boy’s lenses were filthy, he couldn’t have been seeing much of anything anyway. He was allowed to reach over and lift them from his face and was in the process of wiping them clean with the dirty ends of his shirt when he heard the screen door squeak open on its hinges. He would have to see to that eventually, Toby thought, as his oldest came in.

Shoulders square and strong, he was unafraid to seek his father’s eyes out. Maturity was a coat he had slipped on as soon as Tanner’s name had appeared on the news. The talk they had had on lawn chairs out back remembered; the idea fully realised in his head that if he was looking for a role model he had best look further than the circle of his own family.

 _Do not be like us_ , he had told him. It was nice to be listened to, for a change.

 _What’s he doing here_ , his oldest asked, and he had the same eyes are Tanner, just none of the will to use it. The fight left him in the time it took him to hook him thumbs into his jeans and it was an action that had Toby feeling bereft. Here he was, standing in his childhood home, feeling homesick, all of a sudden.

 _Whatever_ , his oldest sighed, waving an impatient hand towards the rest of them, _C’mon already, or we’re gonna be late._

His youngest hitched an elbow into his gut as he scrambled to get up from his chair. He then paused in front of Toby, waiting for what exactly. A goodbye, a hug, what. Toby remembered he still had his glasses wrapped up in his shirt and passed them over. He got a quiet _Thanks dad_ in return.

 _They’re good boys_ , Toby said, once they’d left together, loaded up into his oldest’s truck. He rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. Looked at Debbie and looked away again.

 _They’re good to each other_ , she said, like it was an accusation.

-

Back when Tanner first learned to drive he would leave for days at a time.

He would always come back with a meaner edge like whatever scratch he was leaving to itch just wasn’t being met. Until one day, a couple years later, he rolled right up to Toby and wrestled one of his skinny arms over his shoulder and hoisted him up onto his back like he was a half-empty sack of grain.

He grunted through his teeth when Toby kicked at his stomach but carried him over to his truck with ease, and that was another thing about leaving for days, whenever he came back he always seemed bigger than when he left. Never taller but bulkier, arms and thighs filling out where Toby seemed to stretch out in comparison.

They still looked like brothers, two sides of the same coin, just with one side that was always face down in the dirt.

Tanner threw him down in the passenger seat of his truck, caught the boot Toby aimed at his face while laughing and said, “Cool it, little brother, where’d all this fire come from, huh?” In the struggle he slapped his palm to Toby’s temple and shoved. Toby rocked and came up spitting.

“Fuckin’ asshole,” he said and winced when the ‘ef’ cut deep into his split lip; a day old now but newly split from working his mouth over.

Often enough the well out back would dry up in the sun and need a few extra pumps to bring water to the surface and Toby felt a lot like that whenever he talked, he needed the few extra pumps to break through the grit and the alkali in his throat. Something which was never a problem for Tanner, who was always so free with his hands and his words that it was like he was stealing them straight from Toby’s mouth.

Like now, with Tanner looking at him like he wanted to reach out and rub the blood into his skin along with the insults. Like they were rare and his to keep.

“That’s right,” Tanner said, and the compassion was painted on his face as an afterthought, it barely covered the hunger. “Get it all out now, brother, I know you’ve been saving these up so you go right ahead and cuss me out if it makes you feel any better.”

But as soon as Toby opened his mouth, Tanner stepped back and swung the door shut in his face. He cupped his hand around his ear, mouthing ‘what? what?’ until Toby flipped him off through the glass, and he came around the other side of the truck, slapping his thigh and laughing.

Nothing was funnier than this, at least not to Tanner. Twisting his little brother up was as satisfying a feeling as peeling off a pair of work boots and socks after a long day working in the heat. That immense feeling of relief that made his crotch hot and his palms itch. In the dark of a room he had shared with his little brother for years. Noises like a name and bitten off curses. It was like scratching a different kind of itch. But it twisted Toby up all the same.

Because on those nights the noises weren’t there Toby was willing to admit he missed them.

On this day the razor sharp edge of Tanner was as fine honed as ever and, with the drive of a man with a plan in mind, he took them out onto a lonely stretch of highway. Onto a two-laned road that seemed to loop back where it started. With a horizon that never got any closer.

The landscape rolled over under their wheels; everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

There was a sun warmed sixer on the seat between them and the vibration of the engine had the bottles jumping in their sleeves. God knows where Tanner got it from when everyone knew them, knew their family and their story. But Tanner could also be unduly charming with what god gave him; a ruddy complexion on a mean face. The same eyes that people complimented on Toby but avoided altogether on his brother. Tanner learned early what a couple of words could do to a person when they were measured out so purposefully.

Once they were scraping at the underside of sixty, Tanner reached over for one of the bottles. Using his thighs as leverage he twisted the cap off and the force of the rattling had beer mushrooming over the lip, wetting his hand and darkening his jeans.

“Get this down you,” he said, handing the beer off to Toby without a glance. His hand then went to his mouth and he sucked dirt and beer off the webbing between thumb and finger like he was a sun-drenched man in dire need. “I’m not going to let you drive, little brother, ‘til I see that thing empty.”

The beer was warm on his tongue when Toby tipped it back and the glass even warmer. If Tanner was underage then Toby was worse and in the stifling heat of the car a single bitter mouthful was making his head spin. He rolled down the window to let the wind strip the sweat from his hair, feeling dizzy with the attention that always came with the company.

But it didn’t last long. It couldn’t. Not with the way Tanner was pressing steadily down on the gas. No other car in sight, twenty-three miles of nothing ahead or behind, who else was there to reel Tanner back in besides Toby.

He weighed the bottle in his hand against the reckless speed of the car and brought the bottle back to his mouth, sucking down three, four, five mouthfuls before the tacky heat of it stuck in his throat. Tanner, though, whooped his delight and their speed crawled closer to seventy.

It felt like the truck was going to tear itself apart from the vibrations and Tanner reached out blindly again as they passed the husk of a downed cow, finding the warm damp hairs at the back of Toby’s neck. It seemed to ground them both.

“Toby,” he asked, the blunt edge of his nail scraping skin, “what’d you do, little brother, to get a mouth as busted up as that?”

The answer was nothing and in his silence Toby wondered briefly about asking Tanner to slow down. Mesquites were screaming past his window faster than Toby could make out their spindly limbs. He also thought about telling Tanner how it wasn’t nearly half as bad when Tanner wasn’t around to make things worse. But the hand on his neck was pulling him in and he braced himself on Tanner’s thigh. The case of beer cut into his ribs doing a much needed job of keeping them mostly apart.

“It ain’t so bad,” Toby said, and the words were like the shift of grit under his eyelids after a sandstorm, dry and rough.

When Tanner pulled over onto the nonexistent shoulder it was like a long exhale waiting for the car to roll to a stop. The truck cut out, dust kicking up all around them but Tanner, a static hum in human form, was still shifting under his skin. Toby looked over, guilty, and noticed he was half hard in his jeans too.

Toby thought about the noises he would hear in their room at night. How he never let his hands stray under the covers when they would start up. He’d wake up in the morning feeling the ache in his body from keeping so perfectly still and he wondered if that was how Tanner felt all the time. Wanting something so bad he couldn’t reach out for. And carrying that ache in his shoulders forever.

It was no wonder he was the way he was, a unstable son of a bitch.

Toby’s thumb caught on the outside seam of his jeans, a slow tick back and forth which Tanner inched into at first and then pulled harshly back from. The hand on his neck tightened.

-

When you spend your whole life with nothing, it was hard to ever ask for things.

Toby never really got any better at it.

Tanner just evolved to taking things without asking.

-

It’s said that holes in the gut bleed just as profusely as holes in the head. Tanner had told him this in fewer words, taking his neck in hand one afternoon and steering him far, far enough away from the ranch that the coyote laid out on the dirt couldn’t have been much of a threat.

The animal was kicking its legs helplessly. The neat hole carved out of its stomach bleeding sluggishly then all at once with every twitch of its limbs. Toby could have done without the noises but it was a sick comfort to have Tanner pressed against his back.

It was only a week later that Toby realised this was practice.

His daddy made all of the same noises, laid out on the barn floor. The blood pooling out from under him a matte kind of black that reflected very little. They didn’t know it then but it soaked back into the ground like it was returning home, distilled once again and ready to be poured back into the next of kin. That is, until they broke the chain with legalities and trust funds and Tanner’s spilt blood.

Tanner was a heat pressed against his front at this time. He pulled Toby down into the dirt with him, a coin with two heads the same, just like the one Tanner had won in poker and subsequently lost again soon after. He pushed the rifle away with his speckled boot and made room for them both to stretch out. He shoved his hand under Toby’s shirt and straddled his thigh. He rocked in stops and starts like his body was aching to move after a long, long lifetime of holding still. He was holding a coiled mass under his skin and Toby took his neck in hand and dragged his brother to his chest, urging him to take and take. Laying limp dicked under him, it was all he could offer. He let Tanner spend himself into the crease of hip and simple waited for the darkness to bubble out of the ground and swallow them both whole..

-

He got away with that and so much more. It seemed a trivial thing, in the end, that got him fifteen years. Laughable, even.

-  
-

The night before, in preparation for this, Toby had taken himself in hand. Stripped himself bare and laid out on top of the bedspread. Worked his dick up and down in silence, mind deliberately blank, until he came. He then went over the plan one more time, not making allowances for the possibility he’d be doing it alone.

When he told Tanner of his plan, he had to run through it three times before Tanner was able to keep hold of all the threads and wind them together into one stronger narrative. It was the most Toby had spoken in months.

Ever since he’d been let free from a prison cell, it was almost like Tanner had forgotten how to listen, had forgotten how to let anything bleed into him that wasn’t cold misery and the warming pull of violence. But he hunched over at the first brush of Toby’s voice. And shuddered when Toby stopped for good, throwing himself back in the rickety lawn chair Toby had set out on the porch, so close next to his own that the rusted armrests scraped together from the motion. 

He shuddered like he was coming down from a high then laughed and laughed and said it was the best thing he’d heard in a long while. Fuck it, and his hand had started out on Toby’s knee but lifted to the nape of his neck when Toby twisted into it, he was in.

Toby thanked his foresight the night before for the fact that his dick barely stirred at the touch.


End file.
